The Naked Egg Experiment | Biology for Kids

Doing the naked egg experiment is the perfect kitchen science experiment to teach kids how the cells in their body work. Kids will get an inside look into a raw egg by using common kitchen supplies to dissolve the shell right off of it! Then they will do an “eggsperiment” with the naked eggs to see how they change in different liquids. The naked egg project is perfect for an award-winning science fair project!

Immerse each egg in a cup of vinegar. We started out with four eggs, each in their own cup of vinegar. I’m glad we did four, because one accidentally broke, but we still had three to experiment with! The egg will float at the top and a bit will hover above the surface of the vinegar, which is just fine.

Place the cups in the refrigerator. After about 24 hours check to see if the egg shell has completely dissolved. If not, drain the vinegar and add some fresh vinegar to each cup. You can even add 10 drops of food coloring per cup if you want a brilliantly colored naked egg!

We observed bubbles on the surface of the eggshell almost immediately. Those bubbles are carbon dioxide gas forming due to the reaction between vinegar (which is acidic) and the calcium carbonate egg shell. (Take a look at this amazing color changing fizzy reaction or the explosive film canister rockets to see other examples of an acid reacting with a base!) Over time the vinegar will completely dissolve the entire egg shell.

The Eggsperiment

Once we had our colorful naked eggs we experimented to see what would happen when we put them into other liquids besides vinegar. We chose to use salt water, Sprite, and corn syrup, since we had those on hand.

We placed one naked egg in corn syrup, one in Sprite, and the last naked egg in salt water. I labeled each jar, and left our naked egg project in the refrigerator for another day.

The first thing that impressed me was how fast the color from the egg in salt water leached out! Why do you think this happened?

The results were pretty cool. We ended up with two plump eggs and one egg that my three-year-old said “went flat”. The red dehydrated egg was the one we put into the corn syrup.

Osmosis Egg Experiment

The membrane of a cell (in this case, the egg) is semipermeable, meaning that small particles can go in and out of the cell while large particles stay out. Water and other nutrients (and food coloring) are small enough to travel in and out of the cell. When the concentration of water in the cell is different than the concentration of water outside of the cell, the water will move either in or out of the cell to balance the concentration inside and out. This is called osmosis.

Osmosis explains why the egg in the corn syrup shriveled up. Corn syrup has a very low concentration of water in it so some of the water from the inside of the egg traveled through the membrane into the corn syrup, making the egg cell shrink.

We learned that salt water and sugary soda have similar water concentrations as the inside of the egg since those two eggs stayed plump!

I took this naked egg experiment one step further, just to fulfill my own curiosity. I placed the red egg (the one that got dehydrated in corn syrup) into a cup full of water for another day. What do you think happened?

(I’ll tell you…it plumped right back up as water from the cup traveled back into the egg via osmosis. So cool!)

The Curious Kid’s Science Book

This experiment is one of over 100 from Asia Citro’s new book, The Curious Kid’s Science Book. She is the author of the blog Fun at Home With Kids, which is full of unique, colorful, educational, and safe activities for kids. If you enjoyed this experiment you will LOVE the other 100+ experiments in The Curious Kid’s Science Book.

Please forgive my dumbness. I am so new to science and trying to understand it. I don’t quite understand why the water left the egg to go into the corn syrup. Did any of the corn syrup go into the egg?

Osmosis is kind of a weird concept. It’s all about the concentration of water. So you know that corn syrup is really thick and sugary and doesn’t contain much water. The inside of an egg, however, has a lot of water in it! So the water from inside the egg travels through the membrane to the corn syrup to try to equal out the concentration of water on each side of the egg membrane. Since the egg is losing water it deflates like a flat tire 🙂

I took that same red egg and placed it back in a jar of water after it had been deflated in corn syrup. Guess what? It plumped right back up. At that point, there was less water inside of the egg so water traveled back through the membrane into the egg to make the concentration equal, inside and out. Pretty cool!

Let me know if you have more questions or if this helped clear things up 🙂

Not a dumb question at all! You use the eggs that were in the vinegar. The vinegar is what makes the shell dissolve, and then you can put those “naked eggs” in the other liquids to see how they change. It’s pretty cool!

Hi
My son that is 6 picked this project for his science fair. I loved yours the most and we are so intrigued to see how it works out. I know some words are a lil hard for a 6 year old but he is a smart cookie and I hope we get it. I think I am the one that will need more help understanding this lol.

What would you say the difficulty level would be for this running of the grades 6th through 8th grade and is this a chemistry project or physics or neither? If these questions could be answered as soon as possible before November 27, 2017 that would be awesome.

This would definitely be an easy chemistry project for someone in grade 6-8. They learn about how vinegar reacts with the egg shell to produce carbon dioxide gas and how water flows through the egg membrane through osmosis.